The Killer Laughed
Now he's likely to spend the rest of his life in prison for the beating death and robbery of a gay man
by R. SCOTT MOXLEY
You don't know what to expect of an accused killer awaiting his verdict. Fear, maybe. Or anger. But on Nov. 18, when an Orange County jury found Gregory Michael Pisarcik guilty of torturing, killing and mutilating a gay man, the 28-year-old New Jersey native smirked and nodded, and then chuckled at his somber jurors. Outside the Santa Ana courtroom, the jurors, 11 women and a man, wept and consoled each other. A female juror nearly collapsed in the elevator; others openly worried about their safety. One of them described the gruesome case as "emotionally draining -- the worst thing I've ever seen in my life." A juror asked me, "Why was
laughing?"
Perhaps because the ruse was over. Pisarcik no longer needed to pose as a part-time lover of sodomy, older men, fashion and his mother's underwear, as a victim of a childhood fall, a brutal father, and an uncaring society. During the three-week trial, senior deputy DA Matt Murphy revealed the real Pisarcik, a penniless drifter, thug and thief with a $120-a-day methamphetamine habit who murdered Narciso P. Leggs Jr. during a June 2002 robbery.
Until recently, killing gay men was easily defensible. In 1995, in my first story for the Weekly, I reported on the case of Scott Stockwell, a man who killed Boyd Finkel, a successful gay Irvine businessman. Stockwell admitted that he killed Finkel with a hammer, stole his property and fled to Wisconsin, but claimed self defense: though he slept with Finkel for three nights before the killing, he told jurors he was violently outraged by gay sex. His jurors sympathized. They found him guilty on a lesser charge of manslaughter -- even though blood splatter evidence proved Finkel had been attacked from behind while he read the Sunday comics. Two months after the trial, Stockwell walked out of the Orange County jail a free man.
Stockwell's case harkened back to the archetype, the 1978 trial of Dan White. A former cop and fireman, White, a conservative, resigned his post on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, returned to City Hall with a gun and killed two of the board's most liberal members, Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, a gay man. White's defense team admitted he'd killed the men, but blamed it depression triggered by a bad diet. Twinkies plus stress and the presence of an openly gay man were the lethal combination that killed Moscone and Milk, the defense argued. The judge and jury bought it: White was convicted not of first-degree murder but on a lesser charge of manslaughter.
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RSCOTTMOXLEY@OCWEEKLY.COM
http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/06/12/news-moxley.php